Noted city-hating architect Le Corbusier once said,
"The typical urban street is 'no more than a trench, a deep cleft, a narrow passage. And although we have been accustomed to it for more than a thousand years, our hearts are always oppressed by the constriction of the enclosing walls."
For my part, I used to work in FiDi, and I was always charmed by the view up Wall Street towards Trinity Church.
The facades of the buildings form a canyon (you could call it a trench) that perfectly frames the church’s bell tower.
Wall Street’s skyscrapers come from a time before there were laws about buildings blocking light and casting shadows, resulting in some of the shadiest streets around. But Trinity is placed dramatically in the path of the midday sun while the rest of the street is often dark. The contrast and composition create a sense of expectation and, I always felt, a pull that made you want to go towards it. I was always a little sad to turn onto Broad Street to go to my office.
Arguably the most photographed street in New York is a similar composition, Washington Street in Dumbo. The street ends in a picture-perfect view of the bridge’s Brooklyn-side tower, framed by buildings and tilted jauntily to the west like it's working its angles for you.
New York actually doesn’t have many streets like this because it’s mostly a grid. Our biggest and grandest buildings tend to be set into the grid, and the avenues and streets end at the river. One notable exception is Park Ave, which terminates in Grand Central at its southern part, and the Helmsley building at its northern end (with the Met Life building in the middle). This one is a little difficult to appreciate since cars take up the middle of the street except during summer-streets (pictured below).
Another example from within the grid is East 41st street, "Library Way." I love this street.
I’ve toyed with the idea of writing something about these, but I was always struggling to come up with a better title for the phenomenon than “streets that end in nice buildings,” or really any point to make other than I like them. So I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this book:
And opened it to this page.
A “Closed Vista!” Turns out there is a whole vocabulary for describing different views. Screened vistas, deflected vistas, or my personal favorite the “handsome gesture.”
This book comes from the UK’s townscape movement. It is an unapologetically visual-first view of shaping cities, drawing its principles from the towns, villages, and smaller cities of Western Europe.
I think I like closed vistas for the same reason I like cities generally – they suggest a dramatic sense of the beyond. If I have anything close to a mantra about cities, it’s this quote from Iris Marion Young:
“Dwelling in a city means always having a sense of the beyond, that there is much human life beyond my experience going on in or near these spaces and I can never grasp the whole.”
Young called this sense of the beyond “inexhaustibility.” A good city is socially inexhaustible; you can form many relationships but never know everyone. A good city is also physically inexhaustible; it’s a collection of discretely understood places you can move between, but they are always changing and you can never know them all.
Basically, there is always more of everything – and people who like cities generally like knowing there is always more. Young talks about this as a sense of possibility. You can always get to know someone else; You can always discover a new place. Even the people and places we do know may change over time and invite us to revisit them again.
The closed vistas I’m describing prompt this sense of possibility. They’re not dead ends; it's possible to go around and beyond them, but they are a destination, telling me there is something different at the end of this street and I should go towards it.
A closed vista is just one way of framing what planners and writers have variously termed as beacons, landmarks, attractions, basically anything that has a magnetic power on the traffic around it. It might not even be a building; people are most attracted to other people, so it might be a busy market, a patch of green, or a chess table promising a worthy opponent.
The best places tend to chain these things together and frame them visually so you know they’re there. A closed vista might pull you towards Trinity Church. You go towards it and glance left down Broadway and just catch a glimpse of Battery Park and the crush of people taking pictures of the Charging Bull. Or you look right and see the Woolworth Building shooting up over the skyline and calling you uptown. A good city is a series of things that pull you along. Again, from Young:
The city as a network of discretely understood places, such as particular buildings, parks, neighborhoods, and as a physical environment, offers changes and surprises in the transition from one place to another. Buildings, squares, the twists and turns of streets and alleys, offer an inexhaustible store of individual spaces and things, each with unique aesthetic characteristics. The juxtaposition of incongruous styles and functions that usually emerge after a long time in city places contributes to this pleasure in detail and surprise. This is an experience of difference in the sense of always being inserted.
Young thought that in this variety was the potential for liberation— To be ourselves, be something else, be strangers, or be together. She thought that urban life in its ideal form offered us the greatest chance to be free. When a rat runs over your foot while you wait for a subway that’s 20 minutes away its hard to feel like this ideal is attainable. But the closed vista! The “sense of always being inserted!” Something is baked into the street itself that maintains the pleasure of being pulled in a million directions, even if only for a second.
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I adore the "closed vista" (thanks for teaching your readers that term!) of 41st Street heading toward the New York Public Library, with its literary plaques set into the sidewalk on both sides of Library Way.
There's a wondrous experience of a city canyon/trench every year during "Manhattanhenge."